The Princess and the Artist: Princess Eugenie Meets Tracey Emin

Who'd have thought it? In the history of improbable friendships, this must be one of the least likely. But here they are, the former artist provocateur and the seventh in line to the throne: best of buddies. How did that happen? You'd have to look across the pond for an explanation. The pair met through mutual friends years ago, but it was only in New York over the past year that their friendship blossomed.

Her Royal Highness Princess Eugenie of York moved there last September to take up a position with Paddle8, the online art auction house launched in 2011, backed by Damien Hirst, Matthew Mellon and Jay Jopling, among others. Following an internship at Christie's in 2010, this was the 24-year-old's first proper job, her first significant step into a career in art. As for Tracey Emin, the artist had been travelling to New York for years and had grown weary of hotels. So last year she bought herself a place off Union Square, a pied-à-terre to join her other residences, which include a townhouse in east London, a farmhouse in the South of France and an apartment in Miami.

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And so they found themselves, two expats living in the Big Apple, mixing in the same circles, going to the same dinners, drawn to each other in that heady world where art and celebrity overlap, and 'always getting on like a house on fire', as the Princess puts it. What is it they call New York? A melting pot.

Of course, Eugenie had long been a fan. On her 21st birthday, her mother Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, had given her a small drawing procured from the artist herself. Emin had been heartened to learn the Princess was an admirer and the seed of friendship was sown.

Today, the pair are meeting at Emin's four-storey studio building in Spitalfields. After having their portraits taken for Bazaar, they settle around a table with cups of black tea and honey to chat. On the floor surrounding them lie sketches, sculptures, canvases and assorted paraphernalia, including a pair of tin baths and a scattering of miniature chairs.

It's the first of July, an important day in the London art calendar, and not just because the Serpentine Galleries' annual Summer Party, another crucible of art and celebrity, is being held this evening. (Both Emin and Eugenie attend, alongside Alexa Chung, Bradley Cooper, Keira Knightley, Zadie Smith and Cara Delevingne.) Also scheduled to take place is the sale at Christie's of Emin's most iconic work, My Bed, for which she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. Hitherto owned by Charles Saatchi, the piece consists of a mattress covered in stained sheets, discarded condoms and empty bottles of alcohol. It was made in Emin's council flat in Waterloo in 1998. Eugenie was eight at the time, attending prep school in Surrey.

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Now the age difference fuels their dynamic. Emin is almost maternal towards her royal ward, encouraging her as she embarks on this new career, but protective too; especially today, in the presence of the press, lest anything clumsy is said (Eugenie calls her 'a guardian angel'). The Princess, meanwhile, is a little nervous but eager and endearing as she pulls out her notebook and runs through the questions she has diligently written out in advance for her friend.

Inevitably, the questions touch on tonight's sale, but also on Emin's upcoming solo exhibition at the White Cube gallery and an auction she is curating with Paddle8.

Princess Eugenie: Right, I'm going to start with some light-hearted questions. Whose bed would you most like to sleep in?

Tracey Emin: Well, actually, I've got an immediate answer for that. I really wanted to have a photograph of myself taken in the Great Bed of Ware at the V&A museum. I've always thought it was quite funny. Twenty-six butchers and their wives are meant to have slept in it for a bet; it is massive. When I first asked, the V&A said no, because it was too fragile. Now they've said yes. Otherwise, I think I'd like to spend all night sitting up in bed with someone like Daphne du Maurier. Someone from history.

PE: Oh, yes. Joan of Arc.

TE: With hot toddies and hot-water bottles in a really big Baroque bed.

PE: OK. If you were stranded on a desert island, which artwork would you take with you?

TE: I've always said if I could own one piece it would be Vermeer's The Love Letter, and if I could put it anywhere it would be in a David Chipperfield building. I'm almost there with the building – Chipperfield is building a new house for me in London. The Vermeer is a long way off.

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PE: I think I know the answer to this, but which artists inspire you?

TE: Well, a lot of people are surprised, but my big inspirations are Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, German Expressionism and post-war art. Not contemporary art. When I was at art school I had very little in common with my peers – I was always looking back.

PE: What do you collect?

TE: Much to my embarrassment, small cute things. When I was a child I collected glass-blown animals. All along the seafront in Margate, maybe every fourth shop, there would be glass-blowers and you could say to them: 'Make me an octopus,' or 'Make me a cat,' and they'd make these little animals for you. So if I see any now, I often buy them. You see them dotted all around my studio. I said when I moved into my new studio that I was going to keep it really chic, not have any of these silly little things. Of course they are everywhere. Everyone buys them for me. I also collect ceramic cottages; I've almost got a whole village. I just need a church.

PE: And chairs.

TE: And I collect chairs and tables, which is a bit of a problem. Throughout all my properties I have at least 40 tables and 300 chairs.

PE: Some chairs you can't even sit in because they're too small.

TE: Tiny – but tiny people can sit in them.

PE: Do you collect art?

TE: I collect a lot of ceramics, by younger and older artists. But I don't display them, I just have them. I keeping saying that one day I'll have somewhere to put all my art collection, but I still haven't.

PE: What was the last thing you bought?

TE: A ceramics piece from the Carl Freedman Gallery. The most expensive thing I ever bought was a small ceramic and bronze sculp­ture by Picasso. Everyone said to me: 'Why have you bought a small Picasso?' And I said: 'Because if I wanted I could just put it in my pocket and run.' I mean, when I say to people I've got a Picasso and it's a sculpture, people go 'Wow', but it really is only about four inches by three inches. It's tiny.

PE: Sweet. Where is it?

TE: It's so tiny; I think it's in my safe.

PE: OK, good.

TE: I'll tell you what I really regret. I was going to buy a Louise Bourgeois stuffed sculpture in about 2000. And I didn't. I should have done. I had the money and I could have bought it, but I used the money for a deposit on my house instead.

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PE: In London?

TE: Yes. I asked [Louise Bourgeois's assis­tant] Jerry Gorovoy about it and he said: 'Louise would have said, "Get the house."'

PE: How do you find living in New York and Miami? Are you inspired by both those cities?

TE: In Miami I just feel free. I hardly know anyone. I don't have a car. I ride my bike every day. I get sunburned, much to my embarrassment. I read. And I go to bed. Every time I'm there, I get a thrill. It's the kind of place I can completely disappear and lose myself. New York, on the other hand, is the epicentre of the art world; there are so many collectors and galleries, it's just full-on. Also, people in New York are workaholics. So when I'm there I'm often doing shows or having meetings. It's not a place I socialise much. But since I bought myself a place and no longer stay in hotels, I enjoy being there so much more, and I have a much cosier time.

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PE: Every time I've been with you in New York it's always been so cosy. Nice people and fun little places.

TE: Yes, exactly. It's not flash, it's the complete opposite. I'm not saying my lifestyle in London is flash, but London is always about big events with hundreds of people, whereas in New York it's always small groups and tiny places.

PE: You feel so cool in New York everywhere you go. I remember going into the back room at [the restaurant] Emilio's [Ballato]. You had to walk through the kitchen to get there and it was just the most incredible old Italian place.

TE: Full of old Italians wearing suits and everything.

PE: I love New York. It's the same thing for me: London is full­-on.

TE: The other thing is – don't you find this? – in London if I don't make arrangements for the weekend I tend to spend it on my own. In New York, everyone's doing stuff at the weekends. You've got breakfast, lunch and dinner.

PE: There's food all day. They even have 'linner' – lunch and dinner.

TE: And everything is organised. You can have breakfast with someone between eight and 10, then you've got the fleamarket after. Everyone's kind of like on a schedule at the weekend. It's different from London. I think it's because people in New York are so serious about work. I can't really explain it.

PE: Right, yeah. OK, now I have some serious questions.

TE: They weren't that unserious.

PE: Well these are very serious.

TE: (Laughing) I'll be in tears, I'll be crying.

PE: Let's talk about your bed. Your bed is going to be auctioned tonight. How are you feeling about that?

TE: Well, last week I was feeling so nervous and worried. Then at the weekend I was on a massive high, because there were some really nice things written about it in the papers, and I started to think: 'It's going to be all right.' Tonight I'm going to the auction, which most people would think is insane. But I want to see what happens, because it's history. And it's the piece of art that has got me the biggest status, so I want to be there to see what happens. I never liked the analogy that your art is like your children, but sometimes they are a bit.

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PE: I agree. It was a huge part of your life and now you're almost letting it go by watching it there. I don't think I've ever seen an artist at an auction.

TE: I'm often at charity auctions because I want to push the price up, but in this case I can't do that. I have to be really demure and contained, which is also going to be very difficult because I know I'll probably faint or some­ thing. (Laughs)

PE: When you did My Bed, it was very shocking. Do you think art still has the capacity to shock?

TE: I didn't make the bed to shock. The first time I showed it was in Japan and they had a very different attitude to it. It was only when it came to the Tate and was nominated for the Turner Prize that it was seen as shocking. That was in 1999 and with the Turner back then, it was almost as if people wanted to be provoked, wanted to say: 'Is this art?' There were always headlines in the tabloids. And the bed fulfilled those criteria for a lot of people. Now I think the bed is seen in a very different way; I think it's taken seriously. And if you go and see it at Christie's, it actually looks very sweet.

PE: Do you think someone could come along and do something like that again?

TE: Well, there are things going on in galleries recently that have shocked me. What I'm going to say is really controversial, but what I find the most provocative is the commerciality of art in general. And the fact that a lot of people have forgotten what the meaning of art is; what the intention behind it is. That makes me quite sad. I see a lot of people now who are creative or whatever, but I wouldn't say they were artists. I would say they were working on another level.

PE: It's interesting, because I went to the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney [Museum of American Art] last week.

TE: Oh yes, how was it?

PE: It was great, I mean, there were a couple of rooms that were just unbelievable, and I really love the inflatable Hulk. Next question: beds have been a subject matter for other artists such as Rauschenberg. How do you see your work fitting into that body of work?

TE: I think My Bed is probably the queen of that subject. (PE laughs) Definitely. A lot of men have used it as a subject. I mean, there was an article in The Guardian this week in which Jonathan Jones wrote about the men in history who have drawn a woman on a bed or in a bed, but I've actually made the bed and I've taken the woman out of it; but there's still a ghost of a woman there.

PE: You recently said you hoped to see My Bed placed in an institution. Do you see this as the best possible outcome for the piece?

TE: Definitely. I just hope that somebody buys it and donates it to the Tate or to another museum. ('My Bed' was purchased for £2.54 million by the German collector Christian Duerckheim, who has since confirmed the work will return to the UK on a long-term loan to Tate.)

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PE: Do you see this moment as a new beginning for you?

TE: Yes, because I've got this show coming up at White Cube in Bermondsey, which is all new work – paintings, bronzes, works that people don't expect to see from me.

PE: Are you excited about the show? Are you all sorted?

TE: Bermondsey is a 58,000-square-foot gallery and I make really tiny work, so that makes me nervous.

PE: When I last came to the studio, I saw your bronzes. They were just beautiful. They're going to be there too?

TE: Yes.

PE: Good.

TE: Some of the bronzes are really tiny, like four inches. Some are much bigger, like four or five foot. White Cube is a pretty macho space and it shows a lot of macho art and it's quite a risk for me doing the show there, in lots of ways.

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PE: OK, I'm nearly done, this is my last question. How do you feel about online art markets like Paddle8? Do you think it's a good way of showcasing art and artists and of collecting art?

TE: Well, I think Paddle8 is really good because, first of all, everyone can access it because it's online, everyone can bid and everyone can ask Paddle8 to sell their work. But I also like the idea of artists coming in and curating an auction, which is what I'm doing. The pieces in my auction will be a combination of the cute and the powerful, things that actually turn me on and I really enjoy looking at and also, you know, sweet things that people wouldn't expect me to like. So we're looking for artists whose work comes within those criteria.

PE: Your auction will go online for two weeks around the time of your White Cube show.

TE: You're not going to get this from a [traditional] auction house. They'll never take that risk.

PE: That's what's brilliant about Paddle8.

TE: What made you go into art? You went to Newcastle University, didn't you?

PE: Yes. I did art history and English literature at Newcastle.

TE: With that degree you could have done many different things. And how come you decided that you didn't want to be an artist? A lot of young people want to be artists, they'll do anything. But you decided to work on the other side, to facilitate art.

PE: Doing art at Marlborough, where I went to school, was really quite tough, and I knew that it wasn't the direction I wanted to go. I'd rather show art and give people the joy of seeing it. I remember when I was still at school I went to New York for two days and went to see the gallerist Tony Shafrazi. I was doing a Jean-Michel Basquiat project for my A-levels and I walked into his gallery and it was all Basquiat. And you know what Shafrazi's like, he's amazingly charismatic and he had this booming voice and he took me around the show and ever since then, I just thought: 'Oh, I want to do that.' I want to see this art, I want to put it on the walls, I want to give people the feeling that he gave me when I saw it. Helping someone build up their collection is just so exciting. I know that when I'm building mine up, it's so much fun to see all the little bits you've got.

TE: OK, so if you could acquire any piece of art, what would it be?

PE: Well, I actually just bought a Conor Harrington print and it's sitting in my bedroom. But if I could buy anything it would definitely be Basquiat's Irony of the Negro Policeman.

TE: Oh, brilliant. So it wouldn't be My Bed then? (Laughs)

PE: Well, I've already got my own bed.

This feature originally ran in the November 2014 issue of Harper's Bazaar

'Tracey Emin: The Last Great Adventure Is You' is on at White Cube Bermondsey (www.whitecube.com) from 8 October to 16 November. Her auction 'Tracey Emin: From the Cute to the Powerful' is open for bidding online at Paddle8 (www.paddle8.com) from 4 to 13 November.

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